Bringing Out D. A. Miller

My title sounds like the equivalent of "Barging Through an Open Door." But "bringing out" is not exactly the same as "outing." One can "bring out one's latest book" (publication), or "bring out the turkey dinner" (serving a meal), or "bring out the best in our students" (education)--or combine the last two, as in the mayonnaise ad, "Bring out the Hellmann's, and bring out the best." In fact, if "outing" means revealing what was previously concealed, "bringing out" cannot be such a simple (logically, anyway) one-shot process. One can never be sure something has been sufficiently "brought out." In other words, it has everything to do with style.

I'll begin with two quotations that use the expression "to bring out" in illuminating ways. The first is from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, in a passage in which the narrator describes the paintings of the dark lady of the novel, Miriam Schaefer: "There was one observable point, indeed, betokening that the artist relinquished, for her personal self, the happiness she could so profoundly appreciate for others. In all those sketches of common life, and the affections that spiritualize it, a figure was pourtrayed apart . . . Always, it was the same figure, and always depicted with an expression of deep sadness; and in every instance, slightly as they were brought out, the face and form had the traits of Miriam's own" (46). There is thus a connection between bringing out and an artist's autobiography, but by no means a direct one. The figure being brought out is present everywhere, in every representation, but it is always supplementary and ghostly, not the painting's subject but its mourner. The lineaments of face and form are dimly recognizable in the figure, whose very superfluity in pictorial reality is a clue to its function in autobiography.

The second quotation is from Bringing Out Roland Barthes, by D. A. Miller: "In a culture that without ever ceasing to proliferate homosexual meaning knows how to confine it to a kind of false unconscious, as well in collectivities as in individuals, there is hardly a procedure for bringing out this meaning that doesn't itself look or feel just like more police entrapment. (Unless such, perhaps, were a folie à deux--where "two" stands for the possibility of community--that would bring it out in as subtle and flattering a fashion as, say, the color of a garment is said to bring out a complexion.)" (18). In this quotation, Miller articulates his title twice. "Bringing out" may be a form of torture or police entrapment, and "autobiography" would be, as it often is taken to be, a form of confession (there is also perhaps a reference to the forms of surveillance and social categorization that Miller studied in his earlier book, The Novel and the Police). But Barthes's relation to the novel may make possible the second meaning of "bringing out"--the man who wrote about "the fashion system" and the sexiness of gaps in garments allows the reader to think "fashion," not "fascism." Even if, in this sentence, the word "fashion" is used only as a synonym for "manner"--or even, shall we say, for "style"--the word itself deserves to be "brought out." But in which sense?

We can perhaps get some sense of the complexity and at the same time the in-your-faceness of the process of "bringing out" from the first sentence of D. A. Miller's little book on Barthes. I'll spend a certain amount of time talking about this sentence: "Twenty years ago in Paris, long before I, how you say, knew myself, a fellow student told me he had seen Roland Barthes late one evening at the Saint Germain Drugstore" (3). The sentence begins in typical New Historicist fashion--he was, after all, at Berkeley--with the form and promise of a dated and located anecdote. But there are two odd things about this anecdote: it antedates something it emphasizes (knew myself...